The word Gulag was not often used in Russian — either officially or colloquially ; the predominant terms were the camps () and the zone (), usually singular — for the labor camp system and for the individual camps.

The Gulag Archipelago () is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet forced labour camp system.

When Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953, Olga Ivinskaya was imprisoned in the Gulag, and Pasternak was in Moscow.

The Soviet journalist Yevgenia Ginzburg was a former long-term political prisoner who spent time in the Soviet prisons, Gulag camps and settlements from 1938 to 1955.

Some scholars concur with this view, whereas others argue that the Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, and it did not have death camps, although during some periods of its history, mortality was high in the labor camps.

However, taking into account that it was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or on the point of death, the actual Gulag death toll was somewhat higher, amounting to 1, 258, 537 in 1934-53, or 1. 6 million casualties during the whole period from 1929 to 1953.

The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of " corrective labor camps " (), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the " Gulag ", was a secret decree of Sovnarkom of July 11, 1929, about the use of penal labor that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of Politburo meeting of June 27, 1929.

The Gulag was officially established on April 25, 1930 as the ULAG by the OGPU order 130 / 63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930.

It was renamed as the Gulag in November of that year.

The Stalin version of mocking the intelligentsia was the referral of its part to the Gulag on the basis of far-fetched or fabricated charges.

His conclusions were seen as a criticism of Joseph Stalin's intentions for the Soviet economy: as a result he was sentenced to the Soviet Gulag and later received the death penalty in 1938.

Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas, critical to the war effort.

She was arrested shortly afterward and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, which she survived.

Symbolically, the Memorial to the Victims of the Gulag ( a simple stone from Solovki ) was erected beside the Iron Felix and the latter was removed in August 1991, after the failed rebellion of hard-line Communist members of government.

It conducted mass extrajudicial executions, ran the Gulag system of forced labor camps, suppressed underground resistance, conducted mass deportations of entire nationalities and Kulaks to unpopulated regions of the country, guarded state borders, conducted espionage and political assassinations abroad, was responsible for influencing foreign governments, and enforced Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries.

Outside Astana, there once stood the ALZHIR camp, a Russian acronym for the Akmolinskii Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, one of the most notorious in the Gulag archipelago, which was reserved for the spouses of those considered " enemies of the people " by the government under Joseph Stalin.

When the Soviets arrived they in general took all German prisoners back to a Gulag in Soviet Union where life expectancy was about five years.

In 1947, the Gulag Angara prison labor camp was constructed near Bratsk, with capacity for up to 44, 000 prisoners for projects such as the construction of the railway from Tayshet to Ust-Kut via Bratsk ( now the western section of the Baikal-Amur Mainline ).

Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son Lev Gumilev and her third husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, were Punin died.

Her close friend and fellow poet Mandelstam was deported and then sentenced to a Gulag labour camp, where he would die.

He too was repeatedly taken into custody and died in the Gulag in 1953.

In his book, The Gulag Archipelago, Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described cases of cannibalism in 20th-century USSR.

The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.

According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1, 053, 829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.

Although the term Gulag originally referred to a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting: the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children.

Even more broadly, " Gulag " has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the " meat-grinder ": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.

Western authors use Gulag to denote all the prisons and internment camps located in the Soviet Union.

Scores of Soviet Jews were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to the Gulag, or executed.

Forced re-settlements into Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union occurred.

According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further seven to eight million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union ( including entire nationalities in several cases ).

More than 18 million people passed through the Gulag, with a further 6 million being exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

Many abandoned towns and settlements in the former Soviet Union were established near Gulag concentration camps to supply necessary services.

The extensive system of labor exploitation in the Gulag made a notable contribution to the Soviet economy and the development of remote areas.

During the war and for some time thereafter forty-five camps for about 200 to 250 thousand forced labourers were established, the vast majority of them were deported to the Soviet Union, including the Gulag camp system.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, The Gulag Archipelago is included in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading in 2009.

At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labour camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956, starting with V. I.

* Gulag, the equivalent of laogai in the Soviet Union

As the Soviet Union did not sign any international convention on rules of war, they were denied the status of prisoners of war and instead almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered ( see Katyn massacre ) or sent to Gulag.

* 101st kilometre, a condition of release from the Gulag in the Soviet Union.

: The Soviet Union took over the already extensive katorga system and expanded it immensely, eventually organizing the Gulag to run the camps.

: During the period of Stalinism, the Gulag labor camps in the Soviet Union were officially called " Corrective labor camps.

As head of the Composers ' Union, Khrennikov made no attempt to have the sentence against Lina Prokofieva quashed, or even to mitigate her fate in the Gulag.

After Lina Ivanovna Prokofieva returned from Gulag, the Composers ' Union did nothing to improve the extremely bad living conditions of her family ; it was the prominent singers Irina Arkhipova and Zurab Sotkilava who protected Prokofiev ’ s first family.

The initiator was Iwan I. Agrusow, a former Russian forced laborer, who had decided to stay in West Germany after WWII due to the treatment of former forced laborers in the Soviet Union ( many of them were sent to Gulag upon returning ).

* Russian Map of the Gulag camps across the Soviet Union from the Memorial site

Then, on 5th January 1946, when Estonia had once again become part of the Soviet Union, he was arrested by the Soviet occupation authorities who kept him a short while in the cellar of the NKVD ( later KGB ) headquarters, then kept him in prison in Tallinn, finally, in October 1947, deporting him to a Gulag camp in Vorkuta, Russia.

The best-known example of this are the concentration camp system run by Nazi Germany in Europe during World War II, the Gulag camps run by the Soviet Union, and the forced labour used by the military of the Empire of Japan, especially during the Pacific War ( such as the Death Railway ).

One of Memorial's main projects at the moment is the creation of the Virtual Gulag Museum, which will bring together research and archives from all over the ex-Soviet Union to commemorate and record the existence of the Gulag and the suffering of its victims.

Punitive transfers of population transfers handled by Gulag and the system of involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union were planned in accordance with the needs of the colonization of the remote and underpopulated territories of the Soviet Union.